Zoekresultaten

Optimizing urban green design for restorative effects in residential streets

Eye-tracking street users' visual exploration of buildings across the globe

People in western countries spend approximately 90% of their time indoors. This severely affects their health (WHO 2013; Klepeis et al. 2001). The health risks are exacerbated if people travel between indoor spaces by car or public transport. Buildings on streets specifically designed to create a human scale and connected with the street-space can potentially invite people to walk and enhance their engagement with their surroundings (O’Mara 2019; Ewing et al. 2013). Since the 1960s, influential empirical studies have raised awareness of the walkability of streets (e.g. Jacobs 2008) but reliable evidence on the effectiveness of applied design solutions remains scarce (Spanjar & Suurenbroek 2020). This eye-tracking study focused on the visual ‘scanning’ of streetscapes and people’s appreciation of applied design principles. The aim was to gather together lessons learned from a variety of streetscapes in cities around the world and use them to inform the design of new developments in the Netherlands. Google Street View was used to select 19 images of streets in high-density environments with human-scale attributes in their façades and street-spaces. They were presented in a randomized order in a laboratory setting to 40 participants, who viewed them for 5 seconds. The participants’ visual explorative behaviour was recorded with advanced eye-tracking technology. A survey recorded their overall appreciation of the scenes and mouse-tracking collated their specific areas of interest (see fig. 1). The comparative analysis of the participants’ aggregated eye-fixation images together with the supplementary methods suggests that certain attributes for creating a human scale catch the eye in the first few seconds and are highly appreciated. These include the variety of a street’s façades, a street’s enclosedness, and the level of detail in the transition zone between the private ground floor and the public street (see fig. 2). Green features are particularly valued and might have important restorative qualities for people who spend most of their time indoors (Kaplan 1995; Ulrich 1984). Future research should focus on the design of façades and the street-space itself, taking people’s indoor lives and related stress levels as a starting point.

Eye-tracking street users' visual exploration of buildings across the Western World

People in western countries spend approximately 90% of their time indoors. This severely affects their health (WHO 2013; Klepeis et al. 2001). The health risks are exacerbated if people travel between indoor spaces by car or public transport. Buildings on streets specifically designed to create a human scale and connected with the street-space can potentially invite people to walk and enhance their engagement with their surroundings (O’Mara 2019; Ewing et al. 2013). Since the 1960s, influential empirical studies have raised awareness of the walkability of streets (e.g. Jacobs 2008) but reliable evidence on the effectiveness of applied design solutions remains scarce (Spanjar & Suurenbroek 2020). This eye-tracking study focused on the visual ‘scanning’ of streetscapes and people’s appreciation of applied design principles. The aim was to gather together lessons learned from a variety of streetscapes in cities around the world and use them to inform the design of new developments in the Netherlands. Google Street View was used to select 19 images of streets in high-density environments with human-scale attributes in their façades and street-spaces. They were presented in a randomized order in a laboratory setting to 40 participants, who viewed them for 5 seconds. The participants’ visual explorative behaviour was recorded with advanced eye-tracking technology. A survey recorded their overall appreciation of the scenes and mouse-tracking collated their specific areas of interest (see fig. 1). The comparative analysis of the participants’ aggregated eye-fixation images together with the supplementary methods suggests that certain attributes for creating a human scale catch the eye in the first few seconds and are highly appreciated. These include the variety of a street’s façades, a street’s enclosedness, and the level of detail in the transition zone between the private ground floor and the public street (see fig. 2). Green features are particularly valued and might have important restorative qualities for people who spend most of their time indoors (Kaplan 1995; Ulrich 1984). Future research should focus on the design of façades and the street-space itself, taking people’s indoor lives and related stress levels as a starting point.

Christmas tale of (un)sustainability: reflecting on consumption and environmental awareness on the streets of Amsterdam

In reflecting on Dutch Christmas shoppers, this article will discuss environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), postmaterialist values hypothesis, and ecological modernization theory. According to the EKC hypothesis, while at the initial stages of industrialization material resources are often used unsustainably, continuing industrialization leads to a threshold after which lead to progressively more sustainable technologies. According to the postmaterialist values hypothesis, only wealthier societies can ‘afford’ to care about the environment, assuming that wealth will lead to development of greater concern about and valuation of environment. Finally, ecological modernization theory postulates that environmental conditions improve with advanced technological development and suggests that enlightened self-interest, economy and ecology can be favourably combined and that productive use of natural resources can be a source of future growth. In generalizing economic, political and social trends in relation to consumption in The Netherlands, the aim of this article is to consider the consequences of Western-style consumption for the enterprise of global development. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2013.05.004 https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/

Book review: M. Flynn and D.C. Botherton (eds) 2008. Globalizing the streets: Cross-cultural perspectives on youth, social control and empowerment.

The richness of the studies presented is disappearing under a thick sauce of left-wing ideology and perceptions of globalization, making it too easy for ‘the enemy’ to neglect this book. Quotes like ‘To put it crudely, market tyrannies and state despotism have deepened inequalities and abrogate freedom both within and among nations’, are not very helpful in starting a more open debate on the marginalization of young people in different cultures and countries. I think the studies themselves are very convincing and do not need too obvious links to globalizing evil. The research observations are in contrast with the rather blunt social political analyses. The position of social work, given its empowering tradition with regard to excluded groups (such as many of the youth gangs and cultures in this publication), needs to be a self confident approach, focused on giving insight into and improving practices in the life world contexts of young people.

Preference for different urban greenscape designs: A choice experiment using virtual environments.

Nature in cities serves a multitude of purposes, one of which is that it provides citizens opportunities to recover from stressful daily urban life. Such stress recovering effects of nature can be experienced through urban green, which in urban planning and design contexts can be divided into large natural areas - urban green space - and small scale elements in urban streets: the urban greenscape. The current study aims at finding the extent to which various small scale natural elements in residential streets and their possible configurations influence citizens' preferences for those streets. The research was conducted through an online survey in four cities in the Netherlands (n = 4,956). It used stated choice methods in a virtual environment street design. The method yielded high quality data, indicating that the use of virtual environments and imagery is suitable for stated choice research in the built environment. The results show that especially trees very strongly influence preference, indicating they deserve more attention and space in cities. Grass, which is typically favored by local governments, and vertical green have the smallest effects in residential streets. Furthermore, the concept of greenscape intensity is introduced as the intensities of both the element and the configuration were found to be highly relevant. The results clearly show that the higher either of these intensities, the more likely a respondent will prefer the greenscape design. Furthermore, low intensity on the one can be compensated by high intensity on the other. With these results, urban design professionals and local governments can better trade-off the different aspects of costs versus positive effects of urban greenscape designs.